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Monthly Archives: September 2016

Lots of people have heard of the FizzBuzz interview test (if you haven’t, Google it!), and Jeff Atwood once famously asked: “Why can’t programmers.. program?” But is it a useful test?

I’ve interviewed lots of developers, and hired quite a few of them. I’ve only regretted a handful of hires, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work out how to improve. I’ve made a career out of building teams, and hiring good people is a key part of that. Posing a simple programming challenge – often referred to as a FizzBuzz problem – is a common strategy, and it’s one that interviewers and job-seekers should both understand.

FizzBuzz is Pass/Fail.

One of the mistakes I think people make is in judging the code people write. I always put candidates through a FizzBuzz-type test, but I don’t really care about how good their implementation is. I have one very specific thing I want to know: can they write code, or can they not?

The pass/fail nature of FizzBuzz isn’t the sort of pass/fail you write a unit test for. I have no interest in whether the string they output has correct spacing, or whether they even get the calculation correct. I want an answer to this question:

Has this candidate spent even a little bit of their recent career writing code?

If I’m asking someone to solve FizzBuzz, I’m not hiring a program manager, a technical writer, or a business analyst. I’m hiring someone to write code. I’m hoping to hire someone who can write good code, which solves the correct problem, and produces a good user experience, and doesn’t introduce performance problems, but the core skill I’m looking for is the ability to write code. If they can’t write code at all, the quality or correctness of the code they write isn’t a concern.

FizzBuzz is trivial.

I’ve heard people lump FizzBuzz in with algorithmic problems, like asking a candidate to solve the traveling salesman problem. I’ll admit: if I was asking someone to solve FizzBuzz and send me their answer, it’s an algorithm problem. A very simple one, which I’d expect a high-school student doing a programming course to cope with, but an algorithm problem nonetheless. I don’t ask people to submit a solution, though: I ask them to do it in front of me, and what I’m really interested in is the first step.

Loops are one of the simplest programming concepts.

Fundamentally, programming is about loops and conditions. There are higher-level concepts that are really important, but you really don’t get any simpler than loops and conditions. FizzBuzz has a really simple beginning: “go through the numbers between one and twenty, and …”

The rest doesn’t really matter. I’ll pass someone who isn’t sure about how to work out if a number is a multiple of 3, or 4, or both. I want to know if the candidate can take a really simple problem statement, with an extremely obvious first step, and make a start writing a really simple solution.

People Fail FizzBuzz.

Do 199 candidates out of 200 fail FizzBuzz? No way. If that many fail, you are interviewing people you shouldn’t. Most people I interview have no trouble at all passing FizzBuzz, because I don’t interview people unless I think I might want to hire them. I simply don’t have the time to interview 200 people to find one who can pass FizzBuzz. Nobody has that kind of time to waste.

FizzBuzz is pass/pass.

You shouldn’t be interviewing people who can’t pass FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz is trivial. It’s the sort of simple problem that professional developers can’t have trouble with. Asking a professional developer to write a solution to FizzBuzz is like asking a professional mathematician to solve 5+4.

If FizzBuzz is so simple, why even ask it?

I get candidates to solve FizzBuzz because I’m going to actually test their technical skills later in the interview, and I want them to be comfortable. Interviews are stressful, and the best way to take someone from stressed to comfortable is to let them succeed – and not just succeed, but easily succeed. FizzBuzz lets someone with even the most basic programming ability succeed, and that lets them relax – and that makes it easier for them to show me why they’re worth hiring.

“Interviews are stressful” is no excuse.

I’ve seen plenty of people complain that asking developers to write code during an interview is unfair, because interviews are stressful, and that makes it hard for candidates to perform.

Yes. That’s the point. Let me tell you a story.

My team was releasing a new feature to a business-critical site. I do similar things all the time – that’s my job – but this time, something went wrong. The moment someone hit the site, the server went to 100% processor utilization and stopped responding. Ten minutes later, we managed to kill the process and roll the update back. We postponed the update until tomorrow, and started trying to diagnose the problem.

We couldn’t.

Several person-days worth of testing and analysis later, we hadn’t been able to replicate the problem in any of our test environments, so we decided to deploy the new version again (with a few minor tweaks). Once again, the server went to 100% CPU usage, and after about 10 minutes we were able to roll back the update. We were behind schedule, and senior management started to get involved.

Evenings and weekends were cancelled, experts were consulted, and we put a number of measures in place to ensure the new features went out successfully. We rolled back a number of non-critical changes. We put additional testing in place. We put some data collection in place to collect memory dumps, and we deployed – and our production system came to a screaming halt. Everything froze, and we rolled back. Senior management were upset, and my team’s credibility was at stake. Consultants were being brought in. We collected dump files, fired up debuggers – and diagnosed a faulty third-party library which was misbehaving on some edge-case which only happened in production.

Excising the third-party library and getting a working version tested and released wasn’t an easy task, but it had to happen fast. With the problem identified, we wrote a pile of code at very short notice, got it tested, and pushed it into production – and everything worked. The whole situation lasted only a few days, but the pressure to identify and fix the problem was tremendous, and my team was suddenly under a spotlight.

I need to hire people who can write code under stress.

As a team lead, it’s my job to make sure our team doesn’t end up in high-stress, tight-deadline situations. As a manager, it’s my boss’s job to ensure that stress doesn’t get passed on to my team. But sometimes it goes that way, and when it comes right down to it, I want a team filled with people who can write good code in stressful situations.

Professional developers write code.

When you get right down to it, the job of a developer is to write working code. However you boil it down, someone with any kind of experience – even experience as a student – should have spent plenty of time writing software. Trivial problems should be trivial, even under stress (the kind of stress that happens in real life, whether it’s in exams, during assignment periods, or at work) – and in fact, even moderate or difficult problems should be manageable under stress.

This is what it gets down to. FizzBuzz is trivial. It’s not the problem: as I discussed earlier, FizzBuzz is the simple introduction, designed to help people relax. I’ve seen it work, over and over: stressed people, nervous in a job-interview situation, are distracted by their interest in writing code. Someone who came in to an interview nervous has an easy win, and goes on to tackle some of the harder technical problems I have for them with confidence.

At the end of it all, if you can’t solve FizzBuzz under interview-stress conditions, I can’t trust you to be on my team.

I’ve probably turned down one or two developers I shouldn’t have, over the years, because they froze and couldn’t solve FizzBuzz in the moment. I have successfully built teams full of successful people, though. It hasn’t been by making people solve a FizzBuzz-like problem before hiring them – but watching candidates try to solve such simple problems has been a key part of deciding whether to hire them or not.

In Summary…

FizzBuzz, on its own, is a terrible way to judge whether to hire someone or not – but it is a tremendously useful tool for a team lead who is trying to decide whether someone will be a great team member or not.